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Comment by vpeters25 | Hacker News Reader

> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you

This is true to at least my case: grew up under the metric system and after 15 years living in the US, still have to mentally convert dimensions to metric in order to make sense of them:

- If you point at something and ask me how far it is, the first number that comes to my mind is in meters, then I say that number and add "yards" or mentally multiply it by 3 and add "feets"

- If you ask me to grab something and give you the weight, the number comes in Kg and I mentally multiply it by 2.2 to give and approximate weight in pounds.

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Just FYI, "feets" isn't a word. The plural of feet is feet :)

Similarly, "softwares" isn't a word either, but I hear it a lot. There's only software.

I say this because it's a common mistake among people who speak well, otherwise.

Actually feet is the plural of foot :)

Interestingly, and to my big surprise, "fishes" is quite correct!

"fishes" refers to multiple species of fish, while "fish" is the correct plural form of a school of a single species.

Awesome!Though, which one should you use if both are correct?

"... plenty of fish(es) in the sea." for instance?

That distinction is likely to die out, given that lots of other English words that used to predominantly or only use the same form in singular and plural are steadily moving towards separate plural form.

you know, i rewrote that post several times, rephrasing and correcting it yet I failed to spot "feets".

And "codes" !!

Actually, the use of "code" as a count noun is quite old and well entrenched in the numerical modelling community. I can recall back in the early 1970s hearing Fortran programs routinely referred to as "codes".

Seeing as I started as a Fortran programmer in the 70's I have never heard this usage.

Oh and this was on campus at CIT for a world leading RnD organisation in their math modelling section.

Code is a weird one because there are times when it's correct (e.g. "encryption codes"). But when it's used to mean "software" it should never be "codes", IMHO, though I guess there's a minority in disagreement.

I understand why you would think so, as I haven't heard the usage anywhere else in the software world that I've been, but it is a standard usage in that community; it's not hard to find examples [0] [1] [2] [3].

[0] http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f_src/f_src.html

[1] http://www.unige.ch/~hairer/software.html

[2] http://www.mcs.anl.gov/project/openadf-automatic-differentia...

[3] http://math.berkeley.edu/~strain/Codes/

I most often hear it from programmers who are not native speakers of English, so it always sounds wrong to me.

Yep "codes" just makes you sound amateur and third rate.

same for "data"

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